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Surface science

Separation by reconfiguration

Nature volume 489, pages 41–42 (2012)Cite this article

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Membranes have been made that are hygro-responsive — their wetting properties change when immersed in water. This striking property allows the membrane to separate emulsions into their oil and water constituents.

Oil and water don't mix, so the saying goes — unless they form an emulsion, in which case it is difficult to get them apart. Reporting in Nature Communications, Tuteja and colleagues1 describe a simple, scalable method of great potential for separating such 'oily water' mixtures. They have developed membranes whose surfaces are extremely repellent to oil, but which allow water to permeate freely when oily water is filtered through them, so that the retained liquid is principally oil. Unlike mechanical systems such as centrifuges or settling tanks, which separate oil from water only if the oil phase is a distinct dispersion of droplets, the authors' 'smart' membranes separate emulsions highly efficiently. Such hygro-responsive membranes could be developed to clean up oil-contaminated sea water.

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Figure 1: Flow scheme for separating oil–water emulsions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robert W. Field is in the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PJ, UK.,

    Robert W. Field

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  1. Robert W. Field
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Correspondence to Robert W. Field.

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Field, R. Separation by reconfiguration. Nature 489, 41–42 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/489041a

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